Perhaps it was unique to my neighborhood, but growing up as we played tag or any other number of games, the place that you tried to get without being tagged was called “ghoul”. Now I am aware that many others may have called it home or safe or maybe even goal but in my neighborhood ghoul meant safety. The sounds of friends saying good night as the summer street lights came on rang in my ears when I saw of Quora having almost 100 million of its accounts hacked only days after Marriott reported that hackers had been penetrating their Starwood network for years, and had compromised the data of 500 million people. It seems that in the cyber universe or cyberverse, nowhere is safe anymore. Indeed, when these instances occur, it seems the those affected are to blame, Quara’s programmers are now forcing affected users to reset their passwords, and it advises them to change these passwords if they’re used on any other websites, as if the blame were on the people for putting their information there in the first place and then not protecting it with passwords that were incorruptible.

While the argument may seem far-fetched, the buck doesn’t stop here. Sexual assault victims are being turned into perpetrators, (how dare they accuse a person of such behavior) school shootings are blamed on the schools; they are not well enough armed or trained in weaponry to defend themselves against the now obvious threat, as if there were protections in place in the past that have been left by the wayside, a childish illusion we have outgrown in this new adult age. Things like going home when the street lights came on in summer, playing outside with friends, or having a safe place which you might call home.

A few years ago I was interested to hear about a court argument regarding funding of the public schools in New York City. It was finally determined that the job of a school was to give enough education by the end of high school that a student would be able to make informed decisions enough to engage in the voting process. I think of that now with the free flow of information available on the internet and I wonder what is the purpose of all this available information or is there one? Are we making all this data available for no reason at all or just because we can. It seemed that once educations purpose was for the betterment of ones self and by extension all human kind. Is our new media revolution for the same purpose or have we become Faustian in our scope and find ourselves using this new technology for mere parlor tricks?